Nov. 2nd, 2010

So, you've managed to put your collection of birthers, truthers, Objectivists, assorted scumsuckers and village idiots into Congress. So many in fact that you've managed to take the House of Representatives.

Congratulations, you've earned it. Between the whining of impatient liberals upset that the world wasn't fixed immediately on January 21, 2009 and a news media that loves nothing more than white people making spectacles of themselves, you managed to pull off a decent victory. Not the world-upending win you promised yourselves, but hey. For that, we the Loyal Opposition offer our (grudging) respect.

Now comes the tough part; you've got to do something with that win. We've got a nasty ground fight going on in Afghanistan, people we still need to pull out of Iraq, an economy which might not be in freefall but it's edging way too close for anybody's comfort, unemployment still at 10%, millions of people without access to affordable health care...

...and it now all falls upon you, the Tea Party, to make shit right. You've proved you've got mouth, now you've got to put your money where your mouth is.

Scary, isn't it? You can't just throw tantrums anymore - I know it's your core competency, but you're not at the rallies anymore. You're going to have to do things like write bills and pass votes. What's worse is your constituents will require ideological purity that Stalin might find excessive; if you happen to work with the Loyal Opposition, your chances of getting primaried in the next two years will skyrocket.

If you do nothing, well. Sure, you can shut down the government, you can form all sorts of House investigations into irrelevant nonsense, and that will keep the 10% or so of voters that gave you an edge happy. But if things get worse, even a little worse and you're busy interrogating people as to the authenticity of the President's birth certificate... The American people don't like it when their leaders give the impression of dicking around when their people are suffering. You should know this; it's how you won after all, by yelling that as loud as you could.

Way back in the early days of the Roman Republic, a Greek king by the name of Phyrrus invaded Italy. He was actually one of the few people to ever beat the Romans at their own game and on their own soil, but the cost of winning was too high for him to sustain. After one battle where he wiped out the Roman army in exchange for over half his troops, he supposedly said, "Another such victory and we are undone."

So congratulations, you won. You won the right to look like the pack of intransigent morons you are. You won the privilege of being blamed for every problem in the known universe. You won the honor of failing on a national level. And you earned every second of scorn and contempt you'll pick up in the next few years.

Aug. 7th, 2010

Jul. 31st, 2010

02:30 pm

Once again it's time for a flag dump. And once again, it's a Fenspace thing. This time, though, it doesn't require too much knowledge of Fenspace to understand.

Here's the premise: It's now 2040-50ish in Fenspace, and the environment starts getting really bad on Earth, no matter what anybody does to try and reverse the damage. Just when it looks like Earth and the Convention might be getting a handle on things, something completely out of human control (I'm thinking Yellowstone exploding) shoves the whole thing off a cliff.

So, the Convention engages in the single biggest operation in human history: the Evacuation of Earth. Over the next five years, pretty much 99% of the nine or so billion people on Earth are either moved by the Fen, or leave on their own. Many head for places in orbit (orbital colonies are churned out at a fantastic rate to cope with the influx), Luna, Mars, and the interstellar colonies.

There's an interesting twist, though: Many of the refugees fleeing for new worlds use an experimental FTL engine with a serious design flaw. If pushed past a certain limit of effect, the engine not only kicks the ship to the destination, it throws the ship back in time by a largely-arbitrary amount. The poor schmucks who get thrown around in time lose FTL engines or communications, which apparently is a handwavium safety lock designed to prevent paradox. So thousands, maybe tens of thousands of human refugee ships end up becoming Paradox colonies, losing all knowledge of Earth and evolving on their own until the Convention rebuilds and recontacts them.

This is all a dodge to create a vibrant space-opera world in a relatively alien-free galaxy like Fenspace. One of these days (maybe when I've finished a couple of the stories I have hanging fire) I may put this one up for debate in front of the group. But until then, have some flag doodles.

Our subject today is the United States of America (Exiled). The US was never the most Fen-friendly nation on Earth, even though many of the original Fen came from there. After the Evacuation, the US ended up with three successor states that claimed the name, plus several smaller states that remembered their American roots with something approaching pride, and Xenu only knows how many Paradox colonies out there.

May. 13th, 2010

It's been a while since I've done an art post, and the last couple of days have been halfway decent creativiity-wise, so without further ado I present a bunch of images & some text to go with them. All of this is Fenspace-related work, so if you're confused hie yourself over to the FenWiki for context.